The Government has launched a portal called School GIS for viewing the geographic coordinates of schools, the village, taluka and district it’s located in and a report on its grading.
The information is presented on a map with options to select different base maps (like roads). Zooming in on the map highlights the schools in visible locations which are marked by small icons. Schools are also linked to a report contains useful information like the equipment and facilities, type of school, year of establishment and recognition as well as a rating.
The website also has a search functionality, but it failed to return any results when we searched for schools. Overall the platform is pretty useable, but slow. It would help to have a usable search function as the sheer number of schools in an area can make it hard to find a specific school. Note that for some reason the platform only worked for us in Firefox and not Chrome.
As of now the Schoolgis.nic.in lists over 80% of the schools from most of the states with the exception of Karnataka, Bihar, Sikkim, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Manipur where 50-80% of the data has been listed, Uttar Pradesh where 20-50% of the data has been listed and Jammu and Kashmir for which no data is available.
The platform has been developed in coordination with the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) which developed a mobile app for uploading geo-tagged photographs and associated details captured by educational institutions, on the Bhuvan portal.
Government use of geospatial data:
– In June, assets and facilities created under the MGNREGA scheme in each panchayat started being geo-tagged along with photographs of the facility through a partnership between Ministry of Rural Development and ISRO.
– In October last year, the Department of Panchayats in Kerala said it would start assigning a GPS based permanent Unique Property Identification Number for all buildings in panchayat areas in the state.
– In August 2014, NRSC had updated its Google-Earth like satellite mapping tool Bhuvan with new features like 3D globe view, state viewer, landslide warnings and others. The platform is currently also used for deploying portals like school GIS.
– Bhuvan was previously updated to add features like disaster services, tourism info and high res image in 2013.
